Blood Trust

Начало книги

TWO YOUNG women running. They look like girls, little slips of girls as they fly down ancient cobbled streets, past the blind facades of stone houses, darkened by another of the frequent blackouts. Pale candlelight flickers against windowpanes, medieval and mean, a city within a city. The younger is a girl, barely thirteen, though taller and more filled out than her companion, yet far short of womanly.

Cathedral spires, still silvered in moonlight, ignore the thin thread of red dawnlight tingeing the eastern sky. Stars glimmer defiantly like blue-white diamonds. There is no wind at all; the stillness of the trees is absolute, the shadows they cast impenetrable.

An old man, thin and brittle as the branches above his head, is roused from his drunken stupor by the anxious click-clack of shoes as the women cross his small square. He stirs, regarding them from the stone bench that serves as his home. His arms are crossed over his bony chest as if in reproof. Noticing him, one of the women stops abruptly, slips off her shoes. Now both barefoot, they silently flee the square like shadows before the rising of the sun.

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